As code changes to my own projects and framework implementations on different architectures become less and less now that DC2N5-LC is nearly finished, I decided to get my hands on Android, Arduino and the online mbed development toolkits.

Android programming resulted in a much unexpected easy route: in about one hour I had the Android Studio up and running and my first application running on my own Android smartphone 🙂

For Arduino and mbed I thought to first get a solid console interface between myself and the underlying hardware, in order to evaluate various existing libraries. In both cases that resulted in an easy task. On the mbed platform I was able to quickly extend the USB Serial class to add some functionality I use in my console. Within the Arduino environment extension of the USB Serial class was not my route as when the user part of the program is executed instances of the various serial ports already exist.

I had joined the mbed developer community a while back after buying one of their excellent boards (which is the one used by the non-low-cost version of DC2N5), but I decided not to use their library for the DC2N5 firmware.
I still find their interface API documentation quite dry and while testing the SPI interface module of the mbed library I found an odd behaviour when trying to use 16-bit transfers. I asked for help within the developer community, showing the difference with 8-bit and 16-bit transfer behaviour, and will see what their feedback is.
As I have my own framework instantiated for different architectures and working as expected in all areas I need, that felt like a bit of a setback for me.